Dave Chidley/CFL.ca
Antoine Pruneau has had some bitter tastes in his mouth in 2016. One of them, he dealt with straight away. The other has to wait until at least this Sunday before it can be rinsed. Again, it will take hard work.
“Probably the biggest disappointment of my whole life,” said Pruneau, taking a seat on an empty bench just after the Ottawa REDBLACKS had finished up their Wednesday practice, in preparation for the 104th Grey Cup presented by Shaw.
He was talking about last year’s Grey Cup, one that saw the REDBLACKS fall to the Edmonton Eskimos by a score of 26-20. Pruneau was a man of few words in the Ottawa locker room that day, the wound of disappointment freshly galling. It is still sticking in his craw despite the passage of a year and the memory of his own personal disappointments to distract him.
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Antoine Pruneau is nothing if not driven to overcome. “We were so close,” he said with a slight shake of his head.
Pruneau started that Grey Cup game at strong side (SAM) linebacker, a position he had held since early in his tenure with Ottawa, beginning in 2014. He’ll start again in this year’s game only it will be at free safety and only after Pruneau re-established himself following a mid-season setback.
Back in July, it seemed like Pruneau had really emerged as a bona fide star strong side (SAM) linebacker. A month later, he was dropped from his starter’s role, relegated to rotating in on defence and hustling downfield on special teams.
On July 13th, Pruneau had a massive game at linebacker for the REDBLACKS, in a win at Toronto. He was everywhere that night, with four defensive tackles, another on special teams and a sack. As well, he made a sensational end zone interception of a Ricky Ray pass, only to have it nullified by a coach’s challenge and an illegal contact penalty being called on a teammate about 40 yards away from the play.
A few weeks later, after having a difficult game trying to contain Montreal receiver Nik Lewis, Pruneau was removed from the starting lineup entirely.
He sighs a little bit as I broach the subject for the first time but perhaps that’s because he’d already grown weary of the tale. What I was after, however, was not a rehash of the story as much as I was after the tale of rising again to become a starting force in an improving Ottawa defence.
“I’ve got a lot of pride,” Pruneau said, looking up as if in punctuation of the point. “I want to compete. To me, it was unacceptable to be on the bench.”
He remembers the moment he was told he was sitting, the day of a game between the REDBLACKS and BC Lions on August 25th. Even as head coach Rick Campbell and defensive coordinator Mark Nelson were giving him the news, Pruneau, it seems, was already fighting his way back into a starter’s role.
“At that point, I was really mad,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to hear the coaches’ explanations. “I was like ‘I don’t wanna talk about it. That’s your decision, you’re the coach and I’m gonna deal with it and I’m gonna try to make you change your mind.’”
Pruneau wasn’t angry with the coaches. He was angry with himself, feeling like he’d suffered an embarrassing letdown. His plan was to hustle on special teams, seeing reduced playing time on defence as an opportunity to improve his downfield coverage. In the meantime, Nelson was planning on trying the 27-year-old native of Montreal back at the free safety position, where Pruneau had actually begun his CFL career, taking all his training camp reps and playing two games at rover as his rookie season was launched.
“At the beginning I didn’t feel too natural,” said Pruneau of his mid-season shift to deep middle. He’d only ever played those two games at safety before being bumped into the linebacking corps, where he remained until last August. He’d manned both corners, halfback and linebacker while playing for the University of Montreal. He liked it up at SAM, so the shift wasn’t a welcome one for him.
“I’ve always loved to have my nose close to the action,” said Pruneau.
“It was just more natural to me. That’s why it was a strange transition to go to free safety.”
“I was like ‘I don’t wanna talk about it. That’s your decision, you’re the coach and I’m gonna deal with it.'”
Antoine Pruneau
However, Pruneau was ready, willing and able to do whatever it took to get back into a starter’s role. Do whatever it took to ensure he was helping his team. Besides, the way the REDBLACKS play defence, with players shifting from one position to another in order to try and keep the opposition off-balance, Pruneau still sees time at SAM and he makes no secret that that pleases him.
“I enjoy mixing it up like that. It’s fun to be able to do that,” he said. “I really want to put the emphasis on that. I still think I can play SAM linebacker and they still trust me at that position, too, because when somebody went down, they put me back in at SAM and I think things were great.”
For the most part, veteran Jerrell Gavins will patrol the SAM position for Ottawa this Sunday and Pruneau gets it, volunteering some strong praise for the man who replaced him in the linebacking corps.
“Thing is, we’ve got Jerrell Gavins, one of the most outstanding players I’ve played with,” Pruneau said. “He can do everything on a football field.”
So Gavins will do the up close and personal slogging of a cover linebacker while Pruneau will hang back, read, react and anticipate.
It’s a feeling that he is slowly getting used to. And he’s starting to instill more of his aggressive nature into the position as he becomes accustomed to it.
“When I first started at free safety I felt like I had no control in the game,” he said, a smile starting to crease his face. “I felt like I was just waiting for things to come to me and I really didn’t like that. Now that I’m understanding the game a little bit more and the perspective from the position, I feel like I can have more impact.”
“I feel like I can do a really good job for our team there.”
So, as the Grey Cup game draws near, Antoine Pruneau will once again be a reliable starter on the Ottawa defence. Last summer’s personal detour may not be entirely forgotten, but it has been relegated to a spot that can do nothing but reassure Pruneau’s assertion that determination and hard work are what matter most.
“I had a lot of expectation for myself at the beginning of the season and I didn’t match that at all,” he said, perhaps still not giving himself a break over needing a benching to ignite his game. No matter, this season has been about something else instead. Something that was born in the dismay of Ottawa’s quiet locker room in Winnipeg a year ago.
“My biggest concern was to go back to Grey Cup and get a chance to win it,” said Pruneau.
“That’s all that matters.”
